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The sociology of English academia in the 1980s and 1990s, and Philosophy academia today

Brian Leiter

In my interview with Clifford Sosis awhile back, I observed regarding the illiberal culture in parts of philosophy cyberspace that:

I have no crystal ball, so I can’t tell you whether there will be…a return to the core values of robust expression and debate which are essential for academic life, as even Herbert Marcuse realized in his famous polemic against “Repressive Tolerance.” There is some portion of the younger generation of professional philosophers (grad students and assistant professors) who consistently have the wrong views on these questions. They may well take over the discipline, that I cannot predict. It’s ironic, because other humanities fields, like English, went through this totalitarian catastrophe in the 1980s while philosophy remained a paragon of wissenschaftlich seriousness. The real threats to philosophy as a profession do not come, of course, primarily from benighted youngsters who are victims of group polarization; they come from institutional and economic forces that are basically indifferent to intellectual merit. That’s the real battle that needs to be fought, though I fear we academics are not well-equipped to fight it.

Over at the latest incarnation of a metablog, there is a quite interesting commentary on this issue from someone with experience in both academic English and academic philosophy:

I am an English PhD with an MA in Philosophy from a top-twenty program, and I am struck and puzzled by what seems to be Philosophy’s repetition of the politicized “theory wars” of the 80s-90s. What is going on here? On the basis of pure anecdote and observation, I suspect in part the following:

1. External economic pressures that first hit English in a big way then also started to hit Philosophy in a big way.

2. Specialization exhaustion set in first in English, and now has also become steadily more pervasive in Philosophy.

3. Points 1 and 2 are not unrelated.

4. The new approaches of “feminist philosophy” and the like respond to points 1 and 2 by inventing a new and uncharted territory in response to specialization exhaustion; this new approach must first be justified politically and morally in order then to make itself intellectually fashionable, hence awarded, hence self-perpetuating.

5. The academic context in which this is now occurring is even more administratively heavy than it was three decades ago. Hence the moral and political necessity of the new approaches will also require more direct appeals to top-down administrative intervention than was necessary in English.

6. In both cases, the proponents of the new approaches are basically of two sorts: those already powerful and those not already powerful. The motivations of each group vary, but there is an observable tendency of the first to appeal to morality and justice (they can afford to do so) and of the second to appeal to intellectual novelty and smartness. The second group want to be admitted into the world of the first; the first group wants to pretend that they are not only more intelligent, but also more humane than their elite opponents, with whom they have their fiercest battles.

7. If one or two major Departments are won over to the new approach, the discipline can change very quickly indeed.

8. Thirty years later you’ll realize that the intrinsic conservatism of your discipline, the false certainty of its historical and conceptual divisions, “areas”, and so on, really did need an overhaul. Unfortunately, by then you might have forgotten some of best and most important insights and practices of your discipline prior to the Revolution. In the way that I am an outlier in my generation of English professors for having a pretty thorough knowledge of the Bible, and a bit of Latin and Greek, perhaps some decades hence some young maverick grad student in Philosophy will stand out for her interest in Frege and Quine, her unaccountable fascination with modal and second-order logic, her bizarre affinity for Chisholm.

(A brief aside about the metablog:  like all anonymous fora, the metablogs have been a mixed bag:  a mix of the stupid, the defamatory, and the obsessed, along with the insightful, the amusing, and the illuminatingly contrarian.  The metablogs thrive because of the culture of fear and hostility cultivated by a small handful of philosophy academics active on social media.  But if one can wade through the morass, as I periodically do, there are often genuinely interesting contributions.  UPDATE:  I've removed the link, since elsewhere on the thread, unrelated to what I had linked to, there is a lot of crap, even by metablog standards of "crap."  I do wish the owner of the metablog would do a little moderation, stuff is appearing there that will lead to legal action.)

I find some of this plausible, some implausible, most of it intriguing.  I wonder what readers make of this.  I'd certainly welcome hearing from academics in English as well as Philosophy, and those in other fields that have gone through similar periods of transformation and controversy.  Anonymous comments are fine, but please include a valid e-mail address (which will not appear) and choose a stable pseudonym so other commenters can target their responses accordingly.

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37 responses to “The sociology of English academia in the 1980s and 1990s, and Philosophy academia today”

  1. recent grad

    I like this line:

    "In both cases, the proponents of the new approaches are basically of two sorts: those already powerful and those not already powerful."

    At least we know the vaguely powerful aren't often proponents.

    Reply
  2. anon

    Professors sleeping with students seems to be a hot button topic in analytic philosophy. Let me assure you: introducing more post-Foucauldian, post-Bulterian, gender studies stuff has NOT appreciably eliminated the vulnerability of literary studies graduate students and early career researchers to either general exploitation or sexual exploitation. It still happens, especially among the elite. The only difference is that people are a bit quieter about it, and sometimes the predators wrap themselves up in post-modernist claptrap in order to hide or justify what they're doing. So for those who think that more feminist philosophy or more race philosophy is a panacea to the exploitation of the weak by the powerful (because, let's face it, professors taking sexual advantage of graduate students is on a continuum of many abuses of the weak by the powerful in academia): the answer is no, it isn't.

    On a different note, I would also like to make a warning about ignoring the creep of political totalitarianism. There is no methodology in English right now that is politically neutral. If you work on something relatively "conservative"–if you want to look at the development of meter in early modern poetry and its relationship to classical poetry–you risk being branded a "fascist" (not an exaggeration) and, unless you are willing to show how your project gives lip service to the postmodernist "x studies" crowd, you risk not being able to get on a job. On the other hand, there are entire departments that are cautious of anyone even tainted with the brush of "x studies" (so, for example, if you're a woman or person of color, watch out, no matter how much you just want to write about meter in the renaissance and its relationship to classical poetry!). This goes doubly or triply for people who want to use a traditional method to study writers appropriated by the "x studies" crowd who are–you guessed it–women and people of color.

    Rolling fights about methodology into fights about identity and diversity has led to a situation that is disastrous and fractious to basically everyone involved, especially early career researchers who don't fully understand the political landscape, and in some circles has led to a worse situation for historical minorities in the field.

    Reply
  3. An Education Grad Student

    I wanted to start off by saying that, even though I do not have any explicit philosophy background, I love your blog and read it every day. I work in educational research, and find that philosophy always has much to say about my field, even though most of my peers sadly do not value it. Anyways, education is currently experiencing an epidemic of specialization that I have mixed feelings about; like the commentary above, I appreciate how it has wiped away many of the prejudices and led to greater inclusion where once there was none. (I am a member of a few minority groups, some of which are currently very unpopular in the United States. I value feeling like my voice could be heard, if need be.) I also question, though, some of the intellectual rigor evinced in our specializations. Sustainable epistemology and logic are often compromised in the service of 'theoretical fairness'. To be honest, I truly don't know where I stand in this tug-of-war – even the mention of the Bible in the earlier commentary raised my hackles, but I also don't think that multicultural theory simply for the sake of multicultural theory is necessarily healthy. As it currently stands, though, any suggestion to make any multicultural theory more methodologically rigorous comes in for sharp criticism. I fear that it will get much worse before genuine conversation / debate returns to the fore.

    Reply
  4. Michael Johnson

    I'll admit that I'm confused as to the topic of discussion. Something is threatening to "overhaul" or "change quickly" the discipline. The only thing identified is "'feminist philosophy' and the like", with 'feminist philosophy' in scare quotes, so it's not clear what that is, or what's like it. The proponents are said to be, tautologously, "already powerful or not already powerful." We'll ultimately find, we're told, that we did need an overhaul, but that we've lost people who care about Frege? Or logic? I don't live on the feminist philosophy blogs, but I haven't seen them calling for that.

    Leiter's interview is a lot more meaty (if you follow the link) and I largely agree with the points he makes. I just don't see the Leslie Green issue undermining anyone's concern for Frege or hastening an overhaul of the discipline. Agree or disagree, fine, but nobody throws out their modal logic textbook because of a debate about how to conduct the discourse of transgender issues. I mean, even if you were absolutely convinced that there was a huge contingent of "new consensus/ infantilist" people, and you were convinced that they were *very* infantile, what could you reasonably suppose that would infect? How do you infantilise 2D semantics, or Bayesianism, or the A-theory? It's not like the idea theory or positivism, which had the chance to infect everything. At most, some people disagree with you about a small subclass of normative topics. Surprise, surprise, that's philosophy.

    Reply
  5. Silenced

    There is a pervasive culture of fear in the philosophy profession, which will only hasten the steady and regrettable decline of the discipline.

    Here is just one example. Many people outside of philosophy believe that gender is a straightforward biological concept, which has nothing whatsoever to do with social, psychological or political facts. On this view, transgender people simply identify with a gender other than their actual gender: they do not have a different gender from that which they were "assigned" at birth. Call this the "traditional view".

    Notwithstanding the massive expansion of philosophical gender studies, there are almost no philosophers at leading universities who would admit to holding the traditional view (let alone defend it in a journal article). Any person who did so would be ostracised from the profession, and mocked on "progressive" blogs around the world operated by the philosophical equivalent of the Stasi. Yet I am quite sure that numerous philosophers do in fact hold the traditional view. They have simply been silenced.

    This is a disgraceful and intellectually dishonest state of affairs, which is broadly similar to the appalling developments in English literature since the 1980s. The academic study of English literature is no longer regarded in particularly high esteem by well-informed people, and I fear that the same will happen (or has already happened) to philosophy.

    Reply
  6. Brian Leiter

    I wonder how many philosophers hold what you call the "traditional" view, but I honestly don't know. I suppose more pertinent is that, as we saw with Leslie Green's non-biologically-based defense of Greer's view about transgender women, even this kind of view was met with a call for silencing: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2015/11/greer-green-and-the-thought-police-redux.html

    Reply
  7. Lexington

    I find myself mostly agreeing with Michael Johnson.

    I just don't see most subdisciplines in philosophy as being prone to much meddling by the Infantilists. As is usual to note, philosophy straddles two worlds, one the rather woolly, intuitive domain typical of the humanities, and the other the rigorous, mathematical province of the sciences. The Infantilists have made some hay in the first domain, especially in political and moral philosophy, but have little to show for their efforts elsewhere. I don't imagine that this will change.

    I also don't see any larger economic basis for this movement in philosophy, or any forces or conflicts internal to philosophy as a discipline (e.g., "specialization exhaustion") that drive the Infantilists in philosophy. I don't perceive the Infantilists in philosophy as offering any theory, insight, or motivation independent of the larger cultural Zeitgeist embracing such a view. They present all the appearances of people following, and not leading, this movement. They seem to have adopted their point of view for the same sorts of reasons that those in the larger culture have done so.

    There may be complicated reasons for the rise of Infantilism generally, but I don't see further complicated reasons for its ascent in philosophy.

    Reply
  8. Kramer

    I've said this with different words before but I'll said it again.

    Philosophers wrongly conflate two different changes in profession. One is change in analytic philosophy's "hot" topics, with increasing focus on feminist and identity-related issues. The second is change in the dominant power and hiring networks.

    Make no mistake. The second one is the relevant one for two reasons. First, despite its detractors, I think the style and subject matter of current so-called analytic feminism is no great departure from analytic philosophy of the recent past. Perhaps there's a willingness to argue from premises that are controversial from outside a particular subculture, for example, to assume that "trans women are women" is a premise not a conclusion. Perhaps there's an apparently disproportionate amount of research into the moral power of consent. Perhaps current research is of poor quality (I genuinely don't know) but that's attributable to the researchers not the research program. But, largely, the methods of analytic feminism are continuous with conventional research in analytic metaphysics, philosophy of language, moral psychology and so on.

    This particular research program's rise isn't due to its distinctive methods or insights. Rather, its importance is its use as a signal. Attention to analytic feminism and its cognate sub-sub-disciplines pledges support to an insurgent power network in philosophy, looking to disrupt the status quo in professional philosophy that is represented by the PGR. Members of that network would not dispute my characterization. They would claim that the status quo consists of rape culture, sexist hiring practices, and an onanistic focus on ultimately irrelevant topics like vagueness, parthood, and compositional semantic value. They think they have a duty to disrupt it.

    However, it's hard not to see that characterization of the status quo as self-serving; that overturning a corrupt moral order in philosophy just happens to require hiring your students and friends, adopting policies that constrain others' but not your liberty. Jason Stanley was not an altruist when he was at Rutgers. This is no insult. Few people are. He was an ambitious, combative, accomplished philosopher of language. But when ambition and combatitiveness explain his behavior now, why suppose that his motives are pure? Why suppose that of others, who stand to make huge gains from the institutional and sociological changes they propose at all levels of the profession?

    The simpler explanation is that there are fewer permanent positions in philosophy and that senior philosophers are living longer, staying in positions longer. Suppose that you're a relatively accomplished mid-career philosopher who, in decades past, would now be competitive for desirable positions at UCLA, Georgetown or something similar but philosophy's strained assets diminish your chances to be hired into those positions. I can't think of a better way of improving your credentials than to make it morally reprehensible to hire someone whose research is much different from your own. What we're seeing is an insurgent power network that's abandoned conventional research topics for ones recommended by certain political struggles on the left. They will claim that we are duty-bound to attend to and support this research. They may even believe that's true. But their existence and demands are more simply explained by common desires for power and security and prestige.

    We see who bears the costs for this insurgency in job market statistics. Young female philosophers get a disproportionate and increasingly disproportionate amount of job offers. CDJ's own statistics bear this out. It is unlikely that this bias is due strictly to merit. Rather, the justification is that tenured philosophers are overwhelmingly male. This claim is both true and its truth bad, seeing as hiring practices for most of the past fifty years have been sexist. (Even if they haven't, suppose that they have.) The trouble with this justification is that young male philosophers are bearing the costs for the unjust gains of older, male philosophers. It makes no more sense for young men, who've not benefitted from sexist hiring practices, to bear the cost for them than it does for young women or even non-philosophers to bear those costs. But because members of this insurgency are not the ones likely to bear these costs, they are indifferent to them, which underscores how their struggle is merely political and not moral in nature.

    Reply
  9. Brian Leiter

    I've seen the assertion about female candidates faring better on the job market lately, but could someone provide a link to the CDJ data alleging showing this? Her track record isn't great, so I think the claim and the data bear some scrutiny.

    Reply
  10. a "private sector employee"

    Michael Johnson, what you choose to say is certainly correct, but in defense of the OP I think it's off the mark. I think if you re-read what the OP wrote as if part of an open conversation and with charitableness (i.e., as written with the expectation that others will build on the theme in positive ways even if they completely disagree) rather than pouncing on the first apparently false premise or fallacious inference you could notice, you'll see that the content of feminist philosophy isn't the point. (I can't resist: philosophy seems to now train people…even feminist philosophers…to shun actual conversations in favor of mere negative-spirited premise carving).

    The OP states emphatically that the cause of the change under discussion is economic pressure. This pressure is forcing philosophers to invest more attention in how they justify their position. And it is suggested this increased need to provide justification is an important factor in the move towards super-micro-specialization. The writer then proposes that there's an understandable tendency for people to fall back on moral and political ideals in providing this justification and, to illustrate, distinguishes two ways this might be done given different professional positions. Feminist philosophy is simply suggested as a concrete example of how this process can play out. This all sounds reasonable to me…obviously as part of an ecosystem of many other explanations (just saying there's more to it would be an uninteresting objection).

    The last point they made, about Frege going underground was to convey what might happen in "30 years" if the identified process runs to its logical conclusion. It is clearly stated dramatically to help illustrate what the process being driven by economic pressure amounts to and why we might care. I take it they are simply suggesting that justifying philosophy by reference to already established moral and political ideals comes with the risk of losing sight of those problems which are not clearly connected to the furthering of those ideals.

    What's the connection with English in the 80s? This theme adds another layer (nothing wrong with that!), but I take it that just as literary theory assumed certain beliefs or ideologies as not subject to question, so certain (small?) parts of philosophy are starting to do the same. Of course, all philosophy must make some assumptions, the similarity in this case seems to be that people who object to the assumptions are often attacked on the grounds of their faulty moral character rather than their erroneous rational views.

    Reply
  11. a non

    Michael Johnson writes, "I just don't see the Leslie Green issue undermining anyone's concern for Frege or hastening an overhaul of the discipline."

    I do not think the worry is primarily that philosophers en masse will be convinced to 'overhaul' the discipline so as to accord with whatever notion of "inclusion" or "solidarity" is fashionable. This may appear to be the case if you pay too much attention to the blogs or tweets or facebook posts (It's telling that tweets and facebook posts are where a lot of the action is taking place. The medium truly is the message). But in my own experience talking to grad students and professors in person, there is quite a bit of disdain for the 'social justice warrior' bullshit that doesn't get publicized, for obvious reasons. And believe it or not, many of the people I've spoken with are underrepresented minorities.

    The real worry, I believe, is that panicky administrators, in reaction to both the real and the illusory problems on college campuses, will be pressured to adopt both the 'moral' claims and the political tactics of the social justice crowd. There are plenty of instances where this has already occurred, many of which Leiter has posted. In my own experience, I've seen administrators tell grad students not to work in "white male" areas – so yes, there goes the modal logic textbook. It's this sort of institutional pressure that will change the discipline, not the intellectual 'merit' of the ideas themselves.

    Finally, as is so often necessary in these debates, I must emphasize that I strongly support genuine efforts to ensure that the discipline is welcoming to minorities. My reference to "inclusion" and "diversity" above is simply meant to highlight the fact that social justice folks are trying to claim a monopoly on these values. I do not reject the importance of these values. I do reject, however, narrow and intellectually meritless conceptions of them.

    Reply
  12. Janice

    Great thread so far, everyone.

    A crucial point that gets little attention is that 'feminist philosophers' have less of an investment in the ongoing success of philosophy than philosophers of the more usual kind.

    If you're not a 'feminist philosopher' and you don't want to destroy your own career, then it's in your interest to maintain the general social view that philosophy is a worthwhile activity.

    'Feminist philosophers', by contrast, won't sink if the philosophy ship goes down. They'll just be reshuffled to Gender Studies departments, or even English departments.

    This makes it much less surprising to me that 'feminist philosophers', like feminists who are not philosophers, seem not to care if the impression they give the public about philosophy is horrible. It was, after all, the work of feminist philosophers that led to this widely-read editorial on Slate a couple years back: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/02/sexual_harassment_in_philosophy_departments_university_of_colorado_boulder.html

    Reply
  13. Brian Leiter

    The feminist philosophers I know do not want to be in Gender Studies departments! They identify, professionally and in their style of work, pretty clearly with philosophy–see #8, above. Rebecca Schuman, author of the Slate piece, is such an incompetent bozo, I wouldn't worry too much about her. Today's NY Times reports on a serial sexual harasser in molecular biology here at U of C (I have no knowledge of the case, apart from what I learned today from the Times) who resigned before being fired and IHE reports on an English professor at UC Riverside just fired after allegations of sexual harassment and drug use with students. These days, sexual harassment in the natural sciences is far more often in the news, not that that should make philosophy happy, but at least put things in perspective.

    Reply
  14. Janice

    True enough, Brian Leiter. However, the public already knows that molecular biologists do useful things.

    I've worked in several departments in which many 'feminist philosophers' were cross-appointed in Women's Studies departments. Perhaps that's not the norm? My impression is that departments are much more fluid if you're part of the 'feminist studies' circuit.

    Reply
  15. Post Doc

    Reading this thread, I was reminded of an article by psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Lee Jussim which provided interesting data on the lack of diversity in political views among psychologists – a sharp leftwards swing in recent decades has meant that dissenting, 'right-wing' views are (they claim) almost non-existent in the field and especially in social psychology. The authors go on to claim, anecdotally, that this situation also occurs in other subjects: 'particularly sociology, political science, education, and law'. Their worry of course – plausible to my mind – is that "This lack of political diversity undermines the validity of social psychological science."

    Is there a similar lack of academic philosophers publishing papers and organising conferences that promote certain views and should we be worried about it? I am not really qualified to answer in any serious, empirically grounded way, but it does strike me as at least a reasonable prima facie worry.

    Here is a link to a short summary of the paper:
    http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2016/february-16/psychological-science-and-viewpoint-diversity.html#.Vq98E-yc57s.twitter

    And here is the full article:

    https://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/Duarte-Haidt_BBS-D-14-00108_preprint.pdf

    BL COMMENT: Readers should look carefully at how Haidt defines the political categories for purposes of his analysis.

    Reply
  16. anonymous

    Dicey Jennings did try to explain away her own finding that women have a stronger advantage on the junior job market than candidates from highly ranked PhD programs, with respect to publication counts as a measure of merit. But her own data was re analyzed by others (including David Wallace) who obtained her spreadsheet when it was still available online, and they confirmed the existence of the publication bias favoring women.

    The most thorough discussion remains:

    http://genderandprestige.blogspot.com

    BL COMMENT: Part of my worry is that the assumption that publications=merit is absurd, and is distorting the claims being made.

    Reply
  17. Ligurio

    Dear Philosophers,

    I am the (untenured) author of the above piece. I want only to say three things by way of clarification: (1) recent grad and Michael Johnson rightly point out that some of my formulations are sloppy and inexact; (2) a "private sector employee" offers a more or less accurate reconstruction of my intentions;
    (3) I was thinking and writing on the fly–while waiting for my bus, actually–and my points are not intended as conclusions but as hypotheses advanced in pursuit of an intuition. Professor Leiter's interview (which I only read just now) covers many of the same points in a clearer and more substantive way–as one hopes would be the case, given our different venues!

    I close only by noting that a true fact about our world is that my slap-dash series of hypotheses about another discipline written on a smart-phone and posted anonymously to an..ahem..often strange and reactionary blog has received more attention than even the best and most belabored of my scholarship published in the premier journals and presses of my own discipline.

    Reply
  18. Dean C. Rowan

    I can't contribute anything to the philosophy aspect of the discussion, and I have only questions about the English aspect: Didn't the "theory wars" run roughly through the '70s and '80s? My impression is that the polemics weren't so heated during the '90s, but maybe I wasn't paying attention. Didn't the "theory wars" emerge from a range of literature departments, i.e., not just English departments? Seems to me a number of the combatants were in French and Comp Lit. It's true that Stanley Fish ran Duke's English Dep't from '86-'92. But that was just one department, and by the time he left his contributions to the "theory wars" had waned. He'd picked different battles on the fronts of academic professionalism and university politics.

    Reply
  19. AcademicLurker

    "Didn't the "theory wars" run roughly through the '70s and '80s? My impression is that the polemics weren't so heated during the '90s"

    Depends. Do the Science Wars of the 90s count as part of the Theory Wars?

    Reply
  20. Dean C. Rowan

    Good point. That issue of Social Text, the one with the infamous Sokal contribution, appeared in '96.

    Reply
  21. JCM

    Kramer @ #8: I spend a lot of time hanging out with feminist philosophers, and a lot of what you say rings true, up until the self-serving bit. At that point it's not so much that what you say begins to seem false as it is that you move from 'internal' explanation of the trend to 'external' explanation. You stop explaining philosophically and start explaining economically. This means that the defence I want to give is going to be the wrong kind of defence. I want to respond by saying that the feminist philosophers I know are beacons of earnestness, seriousness, intellectual courage, openness, etc. But people ideologically blinded will often seem this way, and this does not undermine that, on a structural or institutional level, they are being self-serving. But then I'm at a loss what to say. Your claim has to be falsifiable somehow! How would one go about responding to you?

    Reply
  22. MAGraduate

    As a philosopher with an interest in literature, I'm interested in the conservative scholarship in English along the lines that anon in #2 mentioned ("the development of meter in early modern poetry and its relationship to classical poetry"). Are there any departments stereotyped for being conservative in this manner? I'd like to see them.

    Reply
  23. anon

    I'm #2. (If it matters, I'm untenured in a Comp Lit department at a small school, but I have an advanced degree in philosophy.)

    The answer to your question is yes, but for obvious reasons, I'm going to decline naming the departments with particularly conservative reputations. Reputations also vary period to period. Generally, the later you go, the more radical things get.

    Reply
  24. The view from English

    1) One interesting connection no one has mentioned is the canon critique that occupied English from the late seventies to the mid nineties. That seems to be reappearing in philosophy, with the talk of "dead white men" and the like. In English, the debate was largely settled with the "expansion" of the canon to include new fields and writers while still (for the most part) holding on to the old. Philosophy is less of an historical discipline, so things might shake out differently for you folks, but still, be on the lookout for more of this.

    2) There is in fact a renewal of interest in topics that might seem conservative from the outside, including for example prosody and meter and more broadly form and formalism, but these are being approached as it were in new ways and in conversation with the rest of what's going on in the discipline and so are not understood to be conservative from the inside (far from it actually, there were are a lot of the action is). But yes a lot of the old method and knowledge, including close reading and literary history, is very much prized.

    Reply
  25. Philippe Lemoine

    CDJ released a report a few months ago on the data about placement that she and her team collected which contained the results of a logistic regression analysis they performed to analyze them. For some reason, the report appears to be down, but you can still read a discussion of the results here: http://dailynous.com/2015/09/01/philosophy-job-placement-data-update/. Beside gender, the variables in the analysis included year of graduation and area of specialization. I don't think there was any other variable, but I could be wrong as it was several months ago and, even at the time, I only skimmed the report.

    Anyway, based on the discussion on Daily Nous, it seems that, in the data they analyzed, being a woman increased the odds of getting a permanent position by 85%, other things being equal. However, those are *odds*, not *probabilities*. What it means in terms of probabilities will depend on the value of the other variables. But, if we take as baseline the average rate of placement in a permanent position for the whole sample, namely 53%, it corresponds to a 27.5% increase in the probability of getting a permanent position. If I had the data or perhaps even just the report, I could probably do better than that, but I don't.

    As I noted back then, this probably underestimates the effect of gender, since the analysis didn't contain a variable for the number of publications and, according to previous data collected by CDJ (see this discussion: http://dailynous.com/2014/12/23/this-year-in-philosophical-intellectual-history/), men have significantly more publications on average. Thus, assuming that other things being equal having more publications increases one's chances of getting a permanent position (which strikes me as very reasonable and, to be clear, does *not* imply that number of publications tracks merit), including a variable for number of publications in the regression model would no doubt show the effect of gender to be even stronger.

    Of course, it's possible that including even more variables, such as the prestige of the PhD-granting institution, would somewhat mitigate that conclusion. For instance, it could be that women are more likely than men to get their PhD from prestigious institutions and that prestige of PhD-granting institution independently increases one's chances of getting a job, in which case it would mean that part of the effect of gender found by the original analysis actually resulted from that and not from gender per se. But frankly I doubt that it would make a big difference even if that were the case and, as far as I know, there are no data that support this hypothesis.

    It also bears emphasizing that we should always be careful in interpreting the results of a regression analysis. For instance, even if after including a variable for the prestige of PhD-granting institution, we found that it has a positive effect on the probability of getting a permanent position independently of the other variables, one should probably not conclude that all of that effect or even most of it derives from prestige itself. Indeed, it seems reasonable to assume that people who get their PhD from more prestigious institutions tend to be superior on other unobserved characteristics that increase their chances of getting a job, such as the quality of their dissertation.

    Still, I think that, based on the evidence we have at this point, it would be unreasonable to deny that being a woman helps on the job market. Of course, it's *possible* that a more sophisticated analysis would show that not to be the case, but given how strong the effect appears to be in the current analysis, it seems to me that it could only be explained away by hypotheses to the effect that male and female applicants systematically differ from each other in ways that are completely implausible.

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  26. Ian

    Ah, poor English departments. So often the whipping boys, so rarely as "radical" as people imagine them to be. Having just received my PhD in English from a well-known and famously theoretical–if in decline–department, I can assure you that post-Sokal the majority of English departments have long since closed ranks and retreated from the excesses of so-called high theory. Indeed, not only are English departments regarded as deeply conservative by the standards of European Language and Comparative Literature departments–precisely because they generally pay little but lip service to the left agenda so many here are protesting–but because literary theory is now generally approached as an optional part of the undergraduate major (you'll struggle to find undergraduate English majors at prominent universities that require a theory course), and one that is notable more for its historical role in the discipline than for its relevance to the discipline as it stands.

    The English major as it currently exists is predicated largely on A) "close reading" and B) literary history. Sure, the latter might be "radical" in the sense that its current formation is heavily Foucauldian and thus self-aware, but it has very little to do with identity politics. Look at the critiques of Marjorie Perloff after Goldsmith's "The Body of Michael Brown" if you need evidence of this.

    Putting aside the political question entirely, the problem I see with post-Sokal wagon-circling in English is that in its disavowal of the theory of literature (literary aesthetics, if you prefer) it has ceased to be able to articulate a reason for existing. The result has been, as I sometimes joke, that we English folks have shifted from being bad philosophers (or aestheticians) to being bad historians. Bad philosophy is sexy, at least. Bad history is just dull.

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  27. Debbie

    It was alive and well when I went to grad school in Justice Studies (1997-2001) and History (2002-2007). Foucault, Derrida, Horkheimer, Adorno, etc. were all the rage! I've never been a fan of postmodernism. Reading all that bs made me (and still makes me) queasy. Fortunately, most historians reject this kind of nonsense. I really hope we're not in for another round of this destructive nonsense!

    BL COMMENT: Just to be clear, Horkheimer and Adorno are not postmodernists, and only one aspect of Foucault is.

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  28. Russell Blackford

    I have some sympathy for what you're saying, having taught in an English dept. myself at one stage. But I'm not sure why people in such departments have to be *bad* historians, to the extent that they are historians, or *bad* anything.

    The way I see it, academics teaching in departments related to the scholarly study of literature, art … culture more generally … can be just as intellectually rigorous as political historians or anyone else. I'd expect them to study various traditions of literature (etc.), including contexts, literary language, styles and techniques, influences and creative experiments, and so on – it's actually a huge area once you start trying to describe it – and how these things have developed, produced certain kinds of work at certain times and in certain places, controlled the ranges of meanings reasonably ascribable to works, controlled (to varying extents and in various ways) what counts as merit – and doubtless much more that relates to all this but currently eludes me. A lot of that scholarly study of literature (etc.) would be historical, but much of it would be about how these all elements affect how literature (etc.) is produced, interpreted, reasonably evaluated, and so on, today.

    That kind of scholarly knowledge seems important for people who want to be creative in literature and the arts themselves, but also for anyone who wants to take part in an informed way in contemporary debates over cultural trends and products. These are debates that a lot of people care deeply about.

    So, there seems to be a fairly straightforward rationale for rigorous scholarship devoted to literature and culture, and I'm not sure it need produce English (and cognate) departments greatly different from what they actually are. Whether such a rationale provides a basis for English to be as *central a discipline within the humanities* as it once aspired to be might be less clear. But a rationale simply for the practice & teaching of rigorous literary (etc.) scholarship doesn't all seem that difficult to develop. Literature and the other arts seem to be an important set of phenomena to study as systematically and as closely as we can. And again, I'm not sure why academics engaged in its study would have to do anything that they do – whether it's literary history, the study of literary language, the study of what interpretations are culturally available or plausible for texts, etc., etc. – badly. (I'm almost, but not quite, talking myself into going back into my original career as a literary scholar.)

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  29. The view from English

    In response to both Ian: Well, that's the kind of jaundiced, disciplinary self-hatred bred from a bad job market. You see it in every discipline, including philosophy. Indeed, philosophy has overtaken English in that regard I'd say

    In response to Russell: Yes, quite. I agree with most everything you say, including the important point that most departments of English look just like that. However, the important question doesn't seem to me whether English is a "central discipline within the Humanities." Obviously it is in by any measure (number of majors, number of faculty lines, etc.). The question is whether the Humanities are a central division within academia or higher education writ large. There things look ominous, but no more for English than Philosophy or Art History or Classics.

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  30. Ian

    In my defense, I was being flip. And I agree that there's nothing wrong with doing literary history. Indeed, literary history is needed. But as you say, it falls short of seeing its object as anything other than one kind of cultural product among many.

    Now, we can argue that this is in fact the case if we like but if we do that we are, as you say, unable to articulate a reason for discrete English departments to exist outside of an imagined cultural studies department that would include all fields that study culture (classics, visual studies, art history, film, drama, and so on). I would argue that to do this, to understand the study of literature as identical to cultural history, is not just a failure to articulate disciplinary importance but also a failure to take its object seriously.

    Two more brief clarifications. First, when I say bad historians I mean historians that are not highly trained in historical analysis. Certainly practicing literary history results in a kind of ad-hoc training. At the same time, that training is unlikely to be up to the standards of methodological rigor of graduate training in history. As such, while the literary historian might be well-qualified to produce the kind of scholarship you rightly see as important above, that scholarship will always be beholden to, and likely inferior to, scholarship from history departments. It will also be a scholarly niche of relatively little importance.

    Second, as I'm sure you know the kind of history practiced in English departments is what has been called the new historicism: a useful but limited methodological practice that defined itself–in part–by being (as Knapp & Michaels put it) "against theory." Not only does this methodology have the unfortunate tendency to see the object of its study as just another object of culture by bracketing out the "literary" aspect more or less entirely, it also reproduces a central flaw in cultural studies/cultural history/cultural materialism. No matter how illuminating scholarship of this type might be, it will always be subject to the falsifiability test and to accusations of cherry-picking. The cultural objects the scholar chooses to analyze are those that, in that scholar's view, offer the most productive possibilities for her historical analysis. This is true of all historical analysis of course, but the point here is that the methodology of the new historicism assumes and requires an interpretive thesis come before the analysis begins. That thesis will dictate the scholar's principles of inclusion and exclusion to such a degree that she will inevitably leave out objects that do not easily fit her thesis, and thus the accusation of cherry-picking.

    The case of falsifiability stems from the same methodological inadequacies. It ought to be, at least in principle, possible for the scholar to find relevant cultural objects that do not affirm her thesis. If she claims that there are no such objects, she would appear to be telling a story that does not require analysis of the specific objects she has chosen, i.e. she is a vulgar Marxist. If she claims that there are such objects, the coherence and usefulness of her account is subject to question.

    I said before that the new historicism has been useful. It has produced countless accounts of cultural history that stress the ways in which culture is both the product and producer of Foucauldian discourses. This was a new way to look at literature, one that was highly skeptical of literature as a stable epistemological category. I would argue, though, that it has showed us all that it can show us by now. Indeed, because the new historicism self-consciously notes that it cannot produce "new" knowledge, once its point has been taken there is little more to do than simply reiterate that point again and again and again. This is, in my view, the state in which English finds itself now, and I don't find it particularly compelling.

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  31. Full English

    Ian's point about the limits of historicism in English departments is about right: the question is whether anyone would invent the current English department and its default methodology from scratch.
    "It's like a history department, but twice the size, focuses only on cultural artifacts, and its practitioners have no training in historical methodology, but come preprogrammed with a few thin premises (the main thing they retain from their pre history-aping era) that let them hand-wave themselves out of having to engage with empirical counter-arguments. Also, their writing will be famously pretentious and imprecise, but we'll put the entire responsibility for freshman writing courses under their umbrella" doesn't seem too promising.

    Articulating a rationale for the existence of English Literature departments seems easy enough: they're where you go to study and research artworks whose primary material is verbal language. A department focused on the differences involved in creating, processing, experiencing, circulating language-artworks from say, film or sculpture, could involve collaboration with linguists, philosophers of language and (social, fictional) ontology, psychologists and neuroscientists, as well as the kind of connections that currently exist to history, sociology, etc. So why doesn't it? Because Literature departments don't currently cultivate language-oriented scholarship. Perhaps that's because "Theory" was so closely associated with a bad philosophy of language? But it also seems driven by over-compensating for potential irrelevance: you have to show how your "against the grain" reading of an old poem is actually the first step in some wider genealogy that could undermine the whole post-Enlightenment project, which project we already know to be a bad and evil thing, thanks to our misreading of Adorno or our faithful reading of Foucault, or some other "critical" figurehead. That language-art might work differently from some other media, and how, is of small import when so much is at stake, of course, so if you that's what you want to write about then a vibrant, relevant English department is the last place you should hope to find a home (you fascist?).
    That seems like one part of the analogy with philosophy that people worry about: what if philosophy, like the details of poetic form, is too separate from the world? Maybe we shouldn't hire an epistemologist unless there's a reasonable chance their work could contribute to ending racism? English just hired a poetry critic who can undermine neoliberalism in 6000 words, how do we top that? The upshot is that work that could be spent on pursuing your ideas more thoroughly goes into the construction of tendentious, externally-oriented framing narratives.

    Another worry if the analogy proves plausible might be that work in English is more often than not demonstrably circular in the way it reasons about normative matters. The "genealogy" basis for the cultural history approach is to highlight the hidden workings of power in artifacts or developments that naturalize it. Everyone would realize that liberalism is bad or racism is pervasive, that radical=good and conservative=bad, if only we could demystify enough artefacts. The reading of the text proceeds from the assumption that it's hiding certain commitments; the revelation of those commitments in the text vindicates the illuminating value of the methodology. And the work then gets published in journals edited and refereed by people who share the commitments, the methodology, and the project of vindicating their combination. Could philosophy ever become that complacent about reiterating its contingent premises? Some philosophers think it always has been, which is why they want to bring the genealogical approach to bear. Others think that philosophy is one of the disciplines least affected by shoddy premise-play, and see the "new" approach as threatening to English-ize it.

    Finally, it's worth looking at the professional dynamics in English. Over the last 10-15 years, well-placed people have started to ask if the genealogical-cultural-history "paranoid/symptomatic reading" approach has run its useful course. https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10224/3628/sedgwick1-37.pdf?sequence=1, http://engl611-mueller.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/felski.pdf, http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/download/fedora_content/download/ac%3A157280/CONTENT/rep.2009.108.1.1.pdf, http://www.trans-techresearch.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Latour-Why-Has-Critique.pdf, and so on and so on.
    But if it's clear that offering these reservations works pretty nicely for your career when you're tenured at an Ivy, then it's not clear that you can begin a career elsewhere from the same assumptions. Current graduate students whose work deviates from the historicist-genealogy-critique model had better know how to frame it in genealogy-critique, historicism-first terms if they ever want to get a job.
    So what does that mean for philosophy in 20 years' time, if the analogy in the opening post is right? It's hard to know exactly what the metablog's "New Consensus" really involves: mention of it often seems like all-purpose paranoia. But that doesn't matter for structural purposes. If the analogy holds, then in 20 years the elite departments will be full of New Consensors, but five or six individuals will be able to raise to full professorships and named chairs and payrise-generating job offers by publishing, in the Healy 4 journals, first-person accounts of their growing suspicion that there might be more to philosophy than NewConsensorship. Everyone will cite these philosophers as if what they're arguing is a daring break from stultification: they'll give the keynotes at the conferences where the job interviews are being held, and the interviewers will be nodding in the audience. But then any graduate students they're interviewing whose work rests on the same post-NewConsensor presumptions, free from the institutional aura, will only make it to a campus visit if they can hide that under a NewConsensored veil.

    That's the worry we get if we take the analogy with English really literally, I think. I leave it up to readers how convincing or urgent they find it.

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  32. Ian

    Good stuff, Full English.

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  33. David DeMatteo

    "The reading of the text proceeds from the assumption that it's hiding certain commitments; the revelation of those commitments in the text vindicates the illuminating value of the methodology. And the work then gets published in journals edited and refereed by people who share the commitments, the methodology, and the project of vindicating their combination. Could philosophy ever become that complacent about reiterating its contingent premises?"

    Haha, yeah, great stuff. This sounds eerily similar to Karl Popper's diagnosis of vulgar marxism as a self-confirming system.

    BL COMMENT: Alas, Popper couldn't tell the difference between the "vulgar" and the actual theory.

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  34. Russell Blackford

    Interesting long comments at 29, 30, and 31. Thanks! I don't think I have the knowledge or ability to write about this on a similar level of abstraction to Ian and Full English. I also doubt that I can address all their specific points. But some reflections provoked by reading what they have to say…

    As Full English says, the basic rationale for English departments (and similar departments that study literature in other languages or that study other kinds of art, etc.) is easy enough to find – and I don't think that rationale simply turns English into a branch of history.

    Well… I suppose we could ultimately consider *all* scholarly study of art branches of "history" if we defined the latter widely enough, but an honest and rigorous study of past and present literature in English would, indeed, be literary. It would pay close attention to language, to literary conventions, to the way they are developed, experimented with, and the like. As Full English says, it would also draw on, and connect with the work of scholars and scientists in various other disciplines.

    If people in the history department started researching the traditional sorts of questions that people in the English department used to ask themselves and their students back in the day ("How would you play Richard II – as neurotic, self-pitying, on the edge, etc., or as much more measured and in control?" "What was Blake getting at in The Four Zoas?" "How did Yeats interpret Blake and how did this influence his poetry?" "Are the ghosts real in (the diegesis of) The Turn of the Screw?" "How much sympathy are we supposed to have for Humbert Humbert when we read Lolita (an answer suggesting some kind of ambiguity or instability is allowed)?" "Are any or all of these and similar questions in some sense ill-formed or unanswerable or legitimately open to different interpretations, and why?" and so on), it seems as if they'd need to learn a whole lot of specifically literary knowledge and skills. At the same time I'm not convinced that English literature people can't receive whatever "straight" historical training is needed to tackle these questions intelligently (and other questions that we used to ask such as, "How, exactly, did the Globe Theatre physically work?"). If they don't receive it, that seems fixable.

    Coming even closer to the present day, I'd hope people with a scholarly background in studying verbal artforms would have the ability to talk intelligently about issues of current cultural controversy (if the occasional debates about Lolita are not current and controversial enough). E.g. I'd hope that there would be people in the English department who could talk intelligently about the Rushdie Affair and in particular about how The Satanic Verses actually works as a novel in its various contexts, etc.

    I don't agree if Ian is suggesting that rigorous scholarship devoted to this would be expended on something minor. (Maybe I'm misreading him, though.) The "primary rationale", as Full English puts it, is indeed straightforward, and it's a rationale for studying something that I, at least, think is important. I don't need any more grandiose rationale for the existence of English departments or for somewhat large numbers of students wanting to sign up for courses in them.

    As far as I can see, a lot of English departments aren't *greatly* different from how they'd be if we stuck to the straightforward rationale and simply carried it through in a logical way. I expect they'd need some tweaking – but maybe not a huge amount, at least in their undergraduate offerings.

    There have, however, been some grandiose and less straightforward rationales, in the past and present, for English and for the scholarly study of literature and art more generally. There's the rub. Once you start trying to justify that kind of study in a way that goes beyond its straightforward rationale, you place literary scholarship on philosophically shaky and politically controversial ground. You may, as a result, be able to argue that it has far more social or political urgency than the straightforward rationale suggests, and that it should attract more students than would otherwise be the case. It might help you argue for (continued) resources. But what you're doing will itself be controversial, and the result may seem, from my viewpoint, a distorted approach to the subject matter.

    Depending on the grandiose rationale of your choice, you may find yourself approaching literature in an indefensibly reverential, even quasi-religious way. Alternatively, you may find yourself approaching it in an unnecessarily hostile or suspicious way. You may employ methods – and reach conclusions – that are open to fundamental criticisms.

    I'm sure the other people talking about this in the thread know much more than I do about what is actually happening in English departments at the moment. Though I still have some connections with literary scholars, and I still write (and sometimes peer-review) some literary criticism, I haven't been deeply involved with an English department since the early 1980s, when we were all, at least in my vicinity, still arguing about the merits of Yale-style deconstruction. I realise that the high-theoretical debates have moved on since then, so I can't comment on what they presage for philosophy.

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  35. Ian

    I take the problem, the one Full English and I agree upon, precisely to be the disciplinary retreat from issues of language and reading in favor of the cultural studies methodology. Of course the fact that English departments study linguistic artifacts hasn't been forgotten, but that fact has shifted from being a central methodological concern to being something that literary scholars are often trained to gloss over or to think of as a non-issue. This in turn has caused a disciplinary self-blinding that favors something like a mechanistic production of scholarship that doesn't–and I'd argue can't–account for itself on the theoretical level.

    FWIW: I'm less skeptical about the issue of critique than Full English is; indeed I'd argue that work on the level of language can provide important insights that the other disciplines I mentioned above might not be able to. That discussion is probably better had in another forum though!

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  36. The view from English

    I simply do not recognize the discipline that Ian or Russell or Full English describe. There is no widespread "retreat from issues of language and in favor of the cultural studies methodology." English is fundamentally pluralistic in scope and method, but if there is one common thread it is a commitment to reading. Even the most committed historicists are readers and build up from "issues of language." Try to get a job or build a career without that and you're toast.

    Anyway, a discussion thread on an analytic philosopher's blog about the state of English is bound to provide an unfriendly and distorted account of the business, so I'm not surprised, but still ….

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  37. Russell Blackford

    Re 36 – I'm not sure why it's said that I am describing a "retreat from issues of language [etc.]". I thought I was clear that I don't particularly see that, but as someone who's not much of an insider these days I can't really dispute it when Ian and Full English tell me it's happening. I expect the picture on the ground is actually quite messy. English departments tend to vary a bit and (in my experience at least) they're often divided internally along various ideological and theoretical lines. What I do see (in literary journals and conference papers, but also in the wider culture) is quite a bit of the "unnecessarily hostile or suspicious" approach to literature (and other cultural products) that I mentioned. But as for how far it goes down into undergraduate English teaching, etc., I just don't know one way or the other, and I imagine it varies.

    The main point I was trying to make back in 28., in reply to Ian, wasn't hostile. It was that there's a straightforward justification for something very like the traditional sort of English department – and that there's no reason why it can't employ and produce rigorous scholars.

    (I do say "very like". There are probably some things that I'd change. But then, most literary academics I've known would, themselves, probably tweak things in one way or another if they had godlike powers. That also applies to a lot of philosophers and philosophy departments. When the very nature of a discipline and the rationale for it are matters of disagreement within the discipline itself, there will inevitably be pluralism and compromise. Often, there will also be people feeling some resentment that they have to compromise, but that's life!)

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